Britain’s Smoking War Lights Up

Nigel Farage, the populist British politician and ally of Donald Trump, recently lit up outside a pub in London. This was not in itself unusual. He has regularly been photographed with a cigarette in hand, often also with a pint of beer—part of a “man of the people” shtick that he has honed over the years, belying his private education and previous career as a commodities trader. This time, though, Farage was staging a political protest of sorts. Smokers, he told reporters, could be considered the “heroes of the nation in terms of the amount of taxation they pay.”

Farage was speaking after The Sun, a popular right-wing tabloid, reported that the United Kingdom’s new Labour government is planning to expand a law that since 2007 has banned smoking in indoor public places in England to cover pub gardens and other outdoor settings as well. The policy’s details are still in flux, but Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has not denied the thrust of the plan, and his health minister has confirmed that he is considering the measure, pending a “national debate.” Farage, who has long advocated at least a partial reversal of the indoor-smoking ban and who is now seated in Parliament for the first time, was up in arms at the news. In addition to his pub protest, he threatened, in an op-ed, to never go to a pub again if the expanded ban becomes law.

From the outside, this can look like the latest installment in a long-running culture war: Since Brexit—which Farage did much to bring about—Britain has hardly been immune to the sort of populist grievance politics that has held policy progress hostage across the West. On smoking-related policy, the U.K. might appear to mirror the United States, where cigarettes and smoke-free nicotine products have become politicized. (Tucker Carlson said last year that “nicotine frees your mind.”)

Yet the U.K. has long been an international exemplar on the regulation of tobacco products—with surprisingly little domestic controversy. Mitch Zeller, a former director of the Center for Tobacco Products at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, told me recently that many public-health professionals in his field “look at the U.K. as a thought leader” on tobacco control and harm-reduction measures, such as medical interventions to help smokers quit. The U.K. is now poised to go further than any of its peer countries in regulating who can legally buy tobacco products, and toughen restrictions on where they can be smoked. A majority of the British public appears to be on board with that.

The effort by Farage and his ilk to conjure controversy over anti-smoking laws channels modern grievance politics in its pure form: a revolt against expertise and authority in the name of the people—even if the people may not actually be asking for it. The U.K. first saw this dynamic in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, when Michael Gove, a Conservative politician, famously remarked that Britons “have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying that they know what is best.” Farage and others later railed against COVID lockdowns as part of an imagined battle between tyrannical public-health edicts and freedom—despite broad public agreement that they were necessary.

Then again, elite political discourse in Britain has been captured by relatively fringe obsessions and talking points before, such as the debate over banning fox hunting. (Brexit itself arguably started out this way.) Farage and others on the right seem to be hoping that they can fracture Britain’s anti-smoking consensus as part of their broader populist project, or at least use the issue to inflict pain on Starmer’s struggling new government.

[Read: Contesting the science of smoking]

The U.K.’s history of regulating smoking dates back at least as far as the 1960s, the decade after British scientists established a strong link between smoking and lung cancer. As the academic Paul Cairney has written, tobacco companies had emerged from World War II with a “patriotic image” after “providing cigarettes to aid the war effort.” The U.K. government did ban cigarette advertising on television in 1965, but for years, Cairney writes, regulation was mostly voluntary, and “the dominant image of tobacco was as an economic good, providing export revenue, tax revenue, and jobs, with health as a secondary concern.”

Over time, though, this changed, and eventually, in 2007, Tony Blair’s Labour government prohibited smoking in indoor public places in England. At first, Labour considered exempting certain pubs and clubs, for fear, Cairney suggests, that the party would be seen as punishing its traditional working-class base. (The U.K.’s other constituent nations—Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—all set their own smoking policy and had imposed similar bans even earlier.)

In the end, the ban was far-reaching. Critics said it would prove unenforceable, but “compliance was 98 percent in the first year, because there’d been a massive public debate,” Deborah Arnott, a former longtime advocate with a prominent anti-tobacco group and an honorary associate professor at University College London, told me. “Compliance has to be because that’s what people want.” And so, apparently, it was: A poll commissioned by Cancer Research UK a decade later found record low levels of smoking among the British public and only 12 percent support for reversing the ban.

In 2010, a coalition led by the Conservative Party ousted Labour and, among other things, imposed a sharp program of fiscal austerity that stripped back public-health budgets. But the Conservatives left the Labour ban in place and would later introduce tough measures of their own, including outlawing smoking in vehicles when children were present. Then, last year, the most recent Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, laid out plans to ban anyone born in 2009 or later from ever buying tobacco products legally—an initiative hailed by Arnott and other advocates as a historic and world-leading move toward eradicating smoking altogether. Sunak framed the measure as one of fiscal responsibility, arguing that it would reduce pressure on the taxpayer-funded National Health Service and boost national productivity by reducing sickness and disability. He also spoke in paternalistic terms. “I want to build a better and brighter future for our children,” he said. “That’s why I want to stamp out smoking for good.”

And many in Sunak’s party supported his policy. When George Young—a Conservative lawmaker who has long advocated tough smoking restrictions and is now a member of the House of Lords—entered Parliament in the 1970s, his stance “was not wholly unusual, but it’s probably true to say that most of the people on the anti-smoking side were probably not of my persuasion.” Now, he says, “there are many, many more Conservative MPs and peers who feel strongly about smoking” and are campaigning for more restrictions.

But a vocal minority can sometimes be enough to bring about significant shifts in policy. Before Sunak proposed his age-related smoking ban, a center-left government in New Zealand passed a very similar measure, which had broad public support and did not seem an issue of contention in the country’s recent election. So it was a surprise when the incoming government reversed the policy, as part of a coalition agreement with a minority populist party. The revenue from tobacco sales, the new government said, would pay for tax cuts instead. Farage and his allies might favor a similar course of action—and they could one day have the leverage to force the issue.

[Helen Lewis: Goodbye to Tory Britain]

If anything, voters seem more enthusiastic about tobacco controls than Sunak’s government was. According to recent polling by YouGov, majorities of the British public support both the age-related ban and prohibiting smoking in various outdoor settings (though the former measure appears to enjoy much greater support than banning smoking specifically in beer gardens). Smoking policy is “one of the areas where politicians are most out of touch with the public,” Luke Tryl, the executive director of the research group More in Common UK, told me. Perhaps surprisingly, Britons are “really quite authoritarian” on such issues. “We have a joke in the polling world that if you put the word ban in a poll question, support for whatever you’re proposing jumps up by 20 points,” he said. “There’s this myth that there’s a big libertarian-right constituency in the U.K.”

And yet when Sunak put forward his ban, numerous prominent voices on the right attacked it. The Spectator, the magazine of the Conservative establishment, published an article in which its writers shared their favorite experiences of cigarettes; Boris Johnson, a former prime minister (and a former editor of The Spectator) argued that Sunak was ushering in a “smoking apartheid” and decried the fact that “the party of Winston Churchill” wants to ban cigars. Nor was the opposition to the policy confined to the right. Ian Dunt, a liberal journalist, dismissed the ban as authoritarian, unworkable, and unnecessary, as youth smoking rates are already at record lows. In the center-left New Statesman, Megan Nolan wrote that she opposed the ban out of a belief in bodily autonomy—even if that “sadly puts me in a Venn diagram with the likes of Nigel Farage.”

In the spring, Sunak called a general election earlier than many expected. His smoking ban did not become law before the U.K. voted in July, when Labour won a huge majority and swept the Conservatives from power. But Labour always supported Sunak’s ban, and is poised to implement it. The new prime minister has, like Sunak, justified his stance on smoking as motivated by a need to save spending on the National Health Service, which is an institution of quasi-religious importance to Labour and its voters. A report commissioned by the new government found that the NHS is in “critical condition.” Starmer is aiming to save it in part by preventing ailments that cost money to treat. To that end, his push on smoking is just one plank of a broader public-health agenda that will also include curbs on junk-food advertising, for example.

Anti-smoking advocates told me that they don’t anticipate trench warfare over the proposed tobacco measures; as Young put it, “I don’t really see smoking as becoming a huge cultural issue when most people who smoke want to give it up and nobody really wants their children to smoke.” But the case of New Zealand shows that even broad public backing can’t immunize health policy against the power of populist revolt. Starmer himself has acknowledged that “some prevention measures will be controversial,” but pledged that he’s “prepared to be bold, even in the face of loud opposition.”

How loud might that opposition be? Britons may not have any appetite for a big political fight over smoking. But Farage and his party, Reform, can use issues such as smoking bans to energize sections of their base. In July’s election, Reform picked up five seats in Parliament, including Farage’s own. This may seem a modest achievement, but Reform won nearly 15 percent of the popular vote and played spoiler to Conservative candidates in many places—and its popularity has continued to grow since then. (Labour, by contrast, won a huge majority of seats on only a third of the popular vote, because of the distorting effects of the electoral system.)

The Conservatives are currently in the process of picking a new leader, and seem likely to tilt toward the right with their choice. The pull that Farage and his allies might then exercise brings them closer to the heart of Britain’s political debate. Although many Tories, including even committed libertarians, supported Sunak’s smoking ban, two of the favorites in the party’s leadership contest—Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch—voted against it.

Jenrick has already dismissed a pub-garden ban as “nonsense,” arguing that it would hammer the hospitality industry. The Conservatives’ official account on X attacked the proposal as a means of “social control” and “more evidence that Labour hates freedom”; one lawmaker even drew a tasteless analogy with the Nazis. And the tobacco industry, of course, has the deep pockets and lobbying power to foment a longer-lasting backlash.

One thing that could heat up the smoking issue is if the U.K.’s ferocious right-wing press persists in using it as a stick with which to beat Starmer, who is often caricatured as a joyless authoritarian. Already, the Labour leader has become embroiled in a scandal of apparent hypocrisy, over lavish gifts from donors when he has told the British people that they must make sacrifices; his approval ratings are sliding rapidly. Smoking could become a symbolic issue in a bigger fight about whether Starmer is defaulting on his promise to push back against noisy populists and deliver a “politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives.” Farage seems to be hoping that even if smokers’ rights aren’t a universally popular cause, he can still exploit it to help mobilize a generalized disgust with the establishment. Either way, his broader appeal has proved hard to stub out.